Writing in the Yale Daily News Divya Subrahmanyam points to high dollar offers for ideal egg donors.
“Ivy League Egg Donor Wanted.”
Sound familiar? From the News to the New Haven Register, this and similar ads for egg donors have appeared in the pages of local newspapers, attempting to lure intelligent Yale women with sums ranging from $5,000 to $100,000.
One Web site, offering $35,000 is looking for a “Genius Asian donor,” and describes the ideal match: “You should have or be working on a university degree from a world-class university, you should have high standardized test scores, and preferably have some outstanding achievements and awards.”
Another, EliteDonors.com seeks a donor who is Caucasian, “very attractive,” “height 5’9” or taller” and “athletic.” The ad claims to offer $100,000 as minimum compensation.
That $100,000 seems like a large sum of money for human eggs today. But suppose that choosing the right egg results in a smarter child with a responsible, calm, and motivated disposition. The boost in life time income could be many times that initial $100,000 investment.
The value from choosing "premium" eggs will soar as plummeting costs of DNA sequencing technologies bring about an explosion of discoveries about genetic variations for controlling intelligence and personality. The ability to choose between eggs based on detailed genetic profile of donors will greatly increase the probability of getting some desired genetic outcome.
The initial genetic screening of potential donors still doesn't control for the randomness of which portion of a person's DNA went into each egg. But that will become a solvable problem. Fertilization of multiple eggs and genetic testing of each embryo is already possible today. Once we know what thousands of genetic variations do to determine IQ, personality, physical attractiveness, and many other attributes screening of multiple embryos will become very desirable. At that point expect to see skyrocketing prices for donor eggs with the most desired attributes.
An Israeli Jewish doctor successfully started a pregnancy in an Arab girl at the age of 16.
The total fertility rate in Israel is currently estimated at 2.77 children born per woman, one of the highest rates in the world. Ronit Haimov-Kochman, a gynaecologist at Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center in Jerusalem, recently led a team of doctors that successfully performed in vitro fertilization (IVF) on a 16-year-old girl. The patient, AH, had had extensive medical and surgical fertility treatment since the age of 14. Haimov-Kochman tells Ewen Callaway why she helped a teenager get pregnant – and why other Arab teens are likely to follow.
The Israelis are losing a demographic battle of the womb to the much more fertile Arabs.
This fertility doctor sees respecting the mentality and cultural norms of another group as important drivers in her decision. Personally, I'm not suicidal. Quite the opposite in fact. But I respect the cultural norms that cause this doctor to behave suicidally for her culture (though I'd lose all that respect if my own culture was threatened). On second thought, introspecting I see that I do not feel that respect. Indifference is more like it. Not my country. Not my culture.
So what contributed to your team's eventual decision to treat AH?
Treatment of AH was based on the couple's decision to start therapy. Respecting the patient's mentality and cultural norms, the patient's right for therapy, and its wide availability in Israel all contributed to our decision to treat the patient.
It is understandable that in a society with an exceedingly high fertility rate, where the major role of the female spouse is to bear and rear children, strong peer and family pressure is imposed on infertile patients – especially the young and less educated ones.
What do you all think? Do 14 year old Muslim girls in Jerusalem have a right to begin fertility treatment?
More basically, is there a basic right to reproduction? If so, why? Does it not matter what the consequences are?
The Financial Times reports the Chinese government wants the Chinese to buy lots of farmland in other countries in order to boost production to feed China.
Chinese companies will be encouraged to buy farmland abroad, particularly in Africa and South America, to help guarantee food security under a plan being considered by Beijing.
A proposal drafted by the Ministry of Agriculture would make supporting offshore land acquisition by domestic agricultural companies a central government policy. Beijing already has similar policies to boost offshore investment by state-owned banks, manufacturers and oil companies, but offshore agricultural investment has so far been limited to a few small projects.
Industrialization causes higher demand for food which causes higher food prices which causes a flood of capital to go into agriculture. The result? Less land for animals. More pollution from agriculture.
But this plan only works if the target countries allow export of the increased production.
Argentina has banned beef exports, while Egypt and India have stopped shipments of rice.
Kazakhstan has prohibited wheat exports. Russia has slapped a 40pc export duty on shipments, and Pakistan a 35pc duty.
China, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philipines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam have all imposed export controls or forms of rationing to ease the crisis.
Instead, Asia is increasingly transforming farmland into office parks and suburbs. In the Philippines, half of irrigated land has been transformed into urban development in the past two decades. While this fuels new economic engines such as services and industry, it also undercuts resources needed to grow food.
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The population in the Philippines has grown by roughly 2 percent a year since 2000, one of the highest rates in Asia, leading to a corresponding leap in rice consumption. And across Asia, exploding middle classes with more money and bigger appetites are eating more rice – and more meat. Meat production requires huge amounts of water, labor, and grains to feed cattle, which in turn diverts resources away from rice production.
Why have food prices rocketed? Paradoxically, this squeeze on the poorest has come about as a result of the success of globalization in reducing world poverty. As China develops, helped by its massive exports to our markets, millions of Chinese households have started to eat better. Better means not just more food but more meat, the new luxury. But to produce a kilo of meat takes six kilos of grain. Livestock reared for meat to be consumed in Asia are now eating the grain that would previously have been eaten by the African poor. So what is the remedy?
The best solution to a problem is often not closely related to its cause (a proposition that that might be recognized in the climate change debate). China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.
But to the wild animals in Africa and South America the land doesn't look undeveloped. It looks like where they get their food from.
Asian economic development translates into land development for farming in Africa. The more capital accumulates the more capital available to bring more land into production for human uses. Africa's problems have been an obstacle for Western and East Asian people to develop the place. But given high enough food prices the costs of dealing Africa's problems will become affordable for large farming businesses from outside of Africa. The money Bill Gates is spending to develop treatments for tropical diseases will bring treatments that let farmers work in areas which otherwise offer some protection to wildlife due to disease barriers.
Birth control offers a different way to solve the food problem which will save a lot of land from agricultural development.
Being too skinny also poses a dementia risk?
Being obese can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease by as much as 80 per cent, according to a study in the May issue of Obesity Reviews.
It is harder to tease out harmful effects of low weight as compared to overweight because people who have undiagnosed diseases often lose weight before getting diagnosed. So the population of skinny people include people who are about to get diagnosed with cancer or some other disease. The longer a group gets followed the less that bias influences the results.
But it’s not just weight gain that poses a risk. People who are underweight also have an elevated risk of dementia, unlike people who are normal weight or overweight.
US researchers carried out a detailed review of 10 international studies published since 1995, covering just over 37,000 people, including 2,534 with various forms of dementia. Subjects were aged between 40 and 80 years when the studies started, with follow-up periods ranging from three to 36 years.
The review, which included studies from the USA, France, Finland, Sweden and Japan, also included a sophisticated meta-analysis of seven of the studies, published between 2003 and 2007 with a follow-up period of at least five years.
All kinds of dementia were included, with specific reference to Alzheimer’s Disease and to vascular dementia – where areas of the brain stop functioning because the blood vessels that supply them are damaged by conditions such as high blood pressure or heart disease.
“Our meta-analysis showed that obesity increased the relative risk of dementia, for both sexes, by an average of 42 per cent when compared with normal weight” says Dr Youfa Wang, Associate Professor of International Health and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore.
“And being underweight increased the risk by 36 per cent.
“But when we looked specifically at Alzheimer’s Disease, the increased risk posed by obesity was 80 per cent. The increased risk for people with vascular dementia was 73 per cent.
The harmful effects of obesity suggest that bariatric surgery ought to be considered by the chronically obese. Here's another reason: bariatric surgery might cure type 2 insulin resistant diabetes.
Genetic variation in the DNA of mitochondria – the “power plants” of cells – contributes to a person’s risk of developing age-related macular degeneration (AMD), Vanderbilt investigators report May 7 in the journal PLoS ONE.
Mitochondrial genes are a logical place to expect genetic variants to influence the rate of aging. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) accumulates damage and mtDNA damage is probably a major cause of aging through out the body.
The study is the first to examine the mitochondrial genome for changes associated with AMD, the leading cause of blindness in Caucasians over age 50.
“Most people don’t realize that we have two genomes,” said lead author Jeff Canter, M.D., M.P.H., an investigator in the Center for Human Genetics Research. “We have the nuclear genome – the “human genome” – that makes the cover of all the magazines, and then we also have this tiny genome in mitochondria in every cell.”
Canter teamed with Jonathan Haines, Ph.D., and Paul Sternberg, M.D., experts in AMD genetics and treatment, to examine whether a particular variation in the mitochondrial genome is associated with the disease. The genetic change occurs in about 10 percent of Caucasians, referred to as mitochondrial haplogroup T.
The tiny bit of mtDNA is much more vulnerable to damage because the mitochondria have lots of reactive chemicals in them in the process of getting converted from sugar into more useful forms of chemical energy. Some of those reactive chemicals bump into the mtDNA and cause damage that messes up energy production. But better mtDNA sequences code for mitochondrial enzymes that basically break down the sugar more cleanly with less intracellular pollution by free radicals.
Members of this team have already discovered a few other genetic variants that contribute to AMD risk.
The genetics of AMD has been a “hot” area lately, Canter said. Haines led a team that identified a variant in the Complement Factor H (CFH) gene as accounting for up to 43 percent of AMD. Variations in ApoE2 and a gene called LOC387715 on chromosome 10 have also been linked to the disease, and Haines and colleagues demonstrated an interaction between the chromosome 10 gene and smoking in raising AMD risk.
The current study also examined variation in these nuclear genes in 280 cases and 280 age-matched controls, and demonstrated that the mitochondrial genome variation was independent of the known nuclear factors.
Once cell therapy and gene therapy become practical I want to upgrade various parts of my body with stem cells that will create longer lasting tissue. We should rejuvenate our bodies. But we should also reduce the maintenance intervals. Studies such as the one above point us in the direction of how to make longer lasting components.
Stressed kelp cause more reflective cloud formation. Could their growth be boosted on a large scale as a way to cause global cooling?
Scientists at The University of Manchester have helped to identify that the presence of large amounts of seaweed in coastal areas can influence the climate.
A new international study has found that large brown seaweeds, when under stress, release large quantities of inorganic iodine into the coastal atmosphere, where it may contribute to cloud formation.
A scientific paper published online today (Monday 6 May 2008) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) identifies that iodine is stored in the form of iodide – single, negatively charged ions.
Can you think of a way to increase the area of kelp growth in order to boost cloud formation? Seems hard to do. The press release says the kelp need intertidal zones. Most of the ocean seems unsuited and hard to make suitable.
The paper’s co-author, Dr Gordon McFiggans, an atmospheric scientist from The University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (SEAES) said: “The findings are applicable to any coastal areas where there are extensive kelp beds. In the UK, these are typically place like the Hebrides, Robin Hood's Bay and Anglesey. The kelps need rocky intertidal zones to prosper - sandy beaches aren't very good.
“The increase in the number of cloud condensation nuclei may lead to ‘thicker’ clouds. These are optically brighter, reflecting more sunlight upwards and allowing less to reach the ground, and last for longer. In such a cloud there are a higher number of small cloud droplets and rainfall is suppressed, compared with clouds of fewer larger droplets.
“The increase in cloud condensation nuclei by kelps could lead to more extensive, longer lasting cloud cover in the coastal region – a much moodier, typically British coastal skyline.”
A flat area near a coastline, if flooded, might be convertible into a massive kelp bed. Seems very expensive to do though.
Does taking Ibuprofen cut Alzheimer's risk or does some cause of pain cut Alzheimer's risk?
ST. PAUL, Minn. – Long-term use of ibuprofen and other drugs commonly used for aches and pains was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in the May 6, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Previous studies have shown conflicting results, but this is the longest study of its kind.
For the study, researchers identified 49,349 US veterans age 55 and older who developed Alzheimer’s disease and 196,850 veterans without dementia. The study examined over five years of data and looked at the use of several non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). The veterans received medical care and prescriptions through the VA Health Care system.
The study found people who specifically used ibuprofen for more than five years were more than 40 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Results also showed that the longer ibuprofen was used, the lower the risk for dementia. In addition, people who used certain types of NSAIDs for more than five years were 25 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than non-users.
While other NSAIDs such as indomethacin may also have been associated with lower risks, others such as celecoxib did not show any impact on dementia risk.
My guess is that the NSAIDs do this risk cutting. The fact that some have stronger risk reduction effects suggests the drugs themselves make the difference. Also, lots of research finds chronic inflammation increases risk of a variety of diseases of old age.
But long term NSAIDs might not reduce all cause mortality. They might increase risks of other diseases. Safer bets for Alzheimer's disease risk reduction include fruit and vegetable juices, tea, the Mediterranean Diet, fish oils, and curcumin.
A start-up company, Sunrgi, with a photovoltaics design based around focusing lenses and heat radiators claims that within 12 to 15 months they can get radically cheaper photovoltaics into mass production.
A new patents pending solar energy system will soon make it possible to produce electricity at a wholesale cost of 5 cents per kWh (kilowatt hour). This price is competitive with the wholesale cost of producing electricity using fossil fuels and a fraction of the current cost of solar energy.
XCPV (Xtreme Concentrated Photovoltaics), a system that concentrates the equivalent of more than 1,600 times the sun’s energy onto the world’s most efficient solar cells, was announced today by Sunrgi, a solar energy system designer and developer, at the National Energy Marketers Association’s 11th Annual Global Energy Forum in Washington, DC. The technology will enable power companies, businesses, and residents to produce electricity from solar energy at a lower cost than ever before.
“Solar Power at 5 cents per kWh would be a world-changing breakthrough,” said Craig Goodman, president, National Energy Marketers Association. “It would make solar generation of electricity as affordable as generation from coal, natural gas or other non-renewable sources, without requiring a subsidy.”
“In a little more than a year we were able to develop and successfully test XCPV,” said Robert S. (Bob) Block, co-founder and Sunrgi principal. “We expect the Sunrgi system to become available for both on- and off-grid power applications, worldwide, in twelve to fifteen months.”
What differentiates Sunrgi’s XCPV system from any other solar energy system includes: a proprietary, integrated low profile technology for concentrating sunlight; a proprietary technology and methodology for cooling solar cells; a low cost, modular system optimized for mass-production; less land area or “roof top” requirements than typical solar energy systems; a technology roadmap for continuous improvement; low-cost field installation; and, a custom-designed system for easy operation and maintenance.
Their device concentrates the sunlight by a factor of 1600. This allows them to use far less photovoltaic material. But it also requires excellent heat removal from the spots where the light gets concentrated. Since they use such small amounts of photovoltaics they can use highly efficient photovoltaics. So they plan to use Spectrolab (part of Boeing) PV material that is 37.5% efficient. They also track the sun during the day and so get less drop-off in power output in morning and afternoon.
Can they pull this off? Your guess is as good as mine.
On a day when oil went over $120 per barrel you might wonder which direction production and prices are headed. Well, the richest man in the world (Warren Buffett or WB below) asked his long time business partner (Charlie Munger or CM below) where he sees oil production in 25 years. Charlie Munger sees oil production down in 25 years and Warren Buffett thinks a peak is possible in 5 to 10 years.
WB: Oil won’t run out - it doesn’t work this way. At some point the daily productive capacity will level off and then start declining gradually. There is the depletion aspect and the decline curves. We are producing 86m barrels per day or so, more than ever produced. We are closer, by my calculations, to almost our productive capacity, than we have ever been. I think our surplus capacity is less, and quite a bit less, than in past. Whatever that peak is, whether 5 or 10 yrs, the world will adjust, and we will think about it. Adjustments will cause demand to taper off. I don’t know how much oil is there, but there are lots of barrels of oil in place. We never recover total potential. We may have better engineering recovery in future. It is nothing like an on and off switch. You may still have enormous political considerations to get access to avail oil since it so important. There is nothing you can do over short period of time to wean world off oil.
CM: If we get another 200 yrs of growth dispersed over the world while population goes up, all oil coal and uranium will run out so you will have to use the sun. I think there will be some pain in this process. I think it is stupid to use up hydrocarbons of world so quickly. Stupid when there are few and limited alternatives. What should we have done? We should have brought all the oil over from Middle East and put it in our ground. Are we doing it now? No. Government policy is behind in rationality. If we have prosperous civilization, we must use the sun.
WB: Charlie, what is your over/under for oil production in 25 yrs?
CM: Oil in twenty five years, down.
I think that's a very easy call. Trying to call the next 5 years is harder because it is hard to guess how much the oil megaprojects will slip from their scheduled completion dates. Generally the big projects have been taking longer. We might already have peaked in conventional crude production. Or maybe a bunch of megaproject production start dates will line up and cause a new record in production.
Given where China is going with its oil demand (way way up) Buffett grasps what this means for prices.
WB: If this is true, that is big number. China is doing 10m cars this year, so down in 25ys is significant.
44 out of 1000 people in China own a car as compared to about 800 per 1000 in America (and some of us own multiple cars). China's car sales grew by 22% in 2007. China is going to bid up the price of oil so high that Americans will get a shrinking slice of the pie. American daily oil consumption might already have peaked.
We need good batteries to let us shift a substantial portion of all cars to electric power. I wonder whether Warren Buffett expects Burlington Northern Santa Fe (one of his investments) to electrify some of its rail lines once oil hits much higher prices points.
The Chinese are predictably undeterred by worries about weather engineering efforts.
The most extensive operations are taking place in China, however. Here, for example, weather-modification "authorities" use conventional military weaponry to bombard clouds with silver-iodide particles. Under the guidance of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), local "weather changing" offices employ some 39,000 staff equipped with 7,113 anti-aircraft cannons, which, in 2006, were used to fire a million rounds of silver iodide into the atmosphere (with the country spending over $100m a year in the process). The Chinese state news agency claims that between 1999 and 2006, China produced 250 billion metric tonnes of artificial rain, though researchers take this with a pinch of salt.
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The Chinese have gone public with their intention to stop drizzle ruining the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics.
Think the world can be convinced to give up crop genetic engineering, human genetic engineering, weather modification, or continual construction of large numbers of coal electric plants? Not with the rise of China. The Chinese remind me of America in the 1950s.
Weather modification still finds prominent advocates in the United States as well.
New technologies let researchers follow atmospheric events as they happen, says Roelof Bruintjes of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Colorado. "This really is a new era of weather modification."
"There have been big improvements in radar, satellites, and airborne instrumentation, and unmanned aerial vehicle technology," says Joe Golden of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, DC, US.
Bruintjes is skeptical of China's claims because they rely on the results of studies done in the 1960s and 70s before the complexity of Earth's weather was fully understood and there is little data to back-up claims of success.
"There is no evaluation, there is no scientific literature available that can substantiate their claims," he said.
Imagine what China will do once weather modification works well.
Bruintjes is trying to enhance rainfall in many parts of the world.
One of the world's leading experts on weather modification, Bruintjes has helped design cloud seeding and other weather modification programs on every continent except Antarctica. His work focuses primarily on attempts to enhance rainfall in arid and semi-arid regions of the world, including ongoing projects in Wyoming, Australia, Turkey, the Middle East, and West Africa. He has also consulted with Chinese experts about their programs in rainfall enhancement and prevention. In addition to evaluating various cloud seeding technologies, Bruintjes researches inadvertent weather modification, including the effects of smoke and pollution on clouds and rainfall.
People around the world are going to modify the weather. One can easily imagine conflicts between nations because a country that is more upstream causes water to come down on their territory leaving less water to rain down on a country that is more downstream.
A recent gathering of weather modification experts in Westminster Colorado called for a restart of research efforts to develop weather modification technologies.
It's high time the federal government fund research in modifying the weather to bring more rain to the thirsty West and to slow down deadly hurricanes, top scientists said Tuesday.
The brainpower is available, instrumentation is vastly improved, but the feds haven't funded weather-modification research since the mid-1990s, Joe Golden, a scientist specializing in atmospheric modification, said at an international symposium being held this week in Westminster.
The US Department of Homeland Security asked Joe Golden to gather together experts to discuss the idea of diverting hurricanes. Golden and his colleagues think research efforts should aim at diverting and weakening hurricanes.
The hurricane diversion argument seems compelling. Imagine that aircraft had seeded Hurricane Katrina before it approached the Louisiana coast. Tens of billions of dollars of damage might have been avoid.
Alcohol makes us somewhat blind to the meaning of facial expressions.
Working with a dozen healthy participants who drink socially, research fellow Jodi Gilman, working with senior author Daniel Hommer, MD, at the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study activity in emotion-processing brain regions during alcohol exposure. Over two 45-minute periods, the study participants received either alcohol or a saline solution intravenously and were shown images of fearful facial expressions. (Previous studies have shown that expressions of fear signal a threatening situation and activate specific brain regions.)
The same group of participants received both alcohol and placebo, on two separate days.
Comparing brain activity, Gilman’s team found that when participants received the placebo infusion, fearful facial expressions spurred greater activity than neutral expressions in the amygdala, insula, and parahippocampal gyrus—brain regions involved in fear and avoidance—as well as in the brain’s visual system. However, these regions showed no increased brain activity when the participants were intoxicated.
In addition, alcohol activated striatal areas of the brain that are important components of the reward system. This confirms previous findings and supports the idea that activation of the brain’s reward system is a common feature of all drugs of abuse. Gilman’s team found that the level of striatal activation was associated with how intoxicated the participants reported feeling. These striatal responses help account for the stimulating and addictive properties of alcohol.
Does alcohol have a similar suppressive effect in reaction to a happy face? Or does it amplify our emotional response to happy smiling people?
A hobbled ability to detect threats can get one into trouble.
“The key finding of this study is that after alcohol exposure, threat-detecting brain circuits can’t tell the difference between a threatening and non-threatening social stimulus,” said Marina Wolf, PhD, at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, who was unaffiliated with the study. “At one end of the spectrum, less anxiety might enable us to approach a new person at a party. But at the other end of the spectrum, we may fail to avoid an argument or a fight. By showing that alcohol exerts this effect in normal volunteers by acting on specific brain circuits, these study results make it harder for someone to believe that risky decision-making after alcohol ‘doesn’t apply to me’,” Wolf said.
Do some people have minds that naturally fail to identify threatening or fearful or angry faces? Can one lack this ability yet still have the ability to identify happy faces or faces that communicate other emotional states? My guess is that some of these facial expression reading abilities vary separately from each other.
Many climate models show a steadily hotter century because of atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up. But Dr. Noel S. Keenlyside and colleagues at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany and at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg predict in a paper in Nature that global temperatures might stay flat or decline in the next decade.
One of the first attempts to look ahead a decade, using computer simulations and measurements of ocean temperatures, predicts a slight cooling of Europe and North America, probably related to shifting currents and patterns in the oceans.
The team that generated the forecast, whose members come from two German ocean and climate research centers, acknowledged that it was a preliminary effort. But in a short paper published in the May 1 issue of the journal Nature, they said their modeling method was able to reasonably replicate climate patterns in those regions in recent decades, providing some confidence in their prediction for the next one.
This model might not be correct. But suppose this model is correct. Then the climate models which predict warming due to CO2 emissions are inaccurate at least for the next decade. These models might be accurate in their longer term predictions. But we might not know that based on what happens in the next decade.
If Keenlyside is correct then we'll see warming in 15 to 20 years.
It may partly explain why temperatures rose in the early years of the last century before beginning to cool in the 1940s.
"One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)," said Noel Keenlyside from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University.
His group's projection diverges from other computer models only for about 15-20 years; after that, the curves come back together and temperatures rise.
On the bright side, in 15 to 20 years we'll have much better climate models and also better climate engineering technology.
Roger Pielke Jr. points to the basic unfalsifiability of current climate models. If a lack of warming doesn't falsify predictions then what does that say about how we should treat the predictions?
I am sure that this is an excellent paper by world class scientists. But when I look at the broader significance of the paper what I see is that there is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun.
This means that from a practical standpoint climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global climate policy. I am sure that some model somewhere has foretold how the next 20 years will evolve (and please ask me in 20 years which one!). And if none get it right, it won't mean that any were actually wrong. If there is no future over the next few decades that models rule out, then anything is possible. And of course, no one needed a model to know that.
Global warming might well be a big real problem coming up on us. But science is about predicting behavior. If we can understand a system well enough in theory our model of that system ought to allow us to make accurate predictions about it. Well, climate models can't do that.
The development of climate models is a very worthwhile human endeavor. But we can't use climate models to decide what to do about global warming because those models are highly inaccurate and unverifiable.
Update: A Some months back a highly accomplished planetary scientist of my acquaintance (whose aversion to politicized science debates is strong enough that he doesn't want to be quoted by name unfortunately) explained to me that he sees science as the ability to predict. He thinks the sources of error remaining in existing climate models are so large that these models aren't predictive.
The models are going to get better. But unless you happen to have a Ph.D. in atmospheric physics (or, far better, a time machine) it is going to be hard to know when the models cross over into high accuracy. Even once the models get really good we won't know until some time has gone by so that we can see that they really predict. Even then their results will still need to be stated with qualifiers such as "assuming total solar radiation doesn't change much" unless we develop the ability to accurately forecast future output of the sun.
I see the climate change models as having problems similar to the Reagan era Star Wars (Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI) program when computer scientist David Parnas opined that there was no way to verify the correctness of the software that would control the anti-missile defense system. How to prove the correctness of the models? This is a very serious question. Verification and validation of software is hard. For climate models it is especially hard because the systems that the models seek to simulate are not sufficiently well understood, the systems have chaotic effects, and our computers do not have enough capacity. Plus, we can't know what correct outputs look like without using a time machine.
We end up needing to just decide that since CO2 causes more heat to be retained that higher CO2 means a substantial probability of warming which melts Antartica and Greenland ice and floods lots of land. We ought to do something to be on the safe side not because we can prove a future disaster but rather because it is just some unknown but probably substantial probability. That's a harder sell than the absolute certainty that you'll hear from the likes of Al Gore.
In a way the debate between elites in Europe and the United States on global warming is irrelevant. China has sailed past the United States in CO2 emissions and that gap is only going to grow larger in future years. The Chinese aren't going to restrain their CO2 emissions. They want economic growth. Even in Western Europe the voting publics have shown an aversion to severe sacrifice to cut back on CO2 emissions. 50 coal electric plants are coming on line in Europe in the next 5 years even as Germany maintains its commitment to phase out nuclear electric power.
Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.
And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
In the United States, fewer new coal plants are likely to begin operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative.
Before you cry out that Euroes do far more than ugly polluting Americans (who are more opposed to coal pollution than are Europeans probably because Americans have higher living standards) keep in mind that European nations have still done far less than needed if we accept some of the more pessimistic IPCC forecasts and arguments about the resulting deleterious effects. Also, looks to me that they've reached the political limits of how much they'll sacrifice.
In a nutshell, people aren't going to sacrifice very much and the number of people who are consuming fossil fuels goes up every year and the average amount of fossil fuels consumed per person goes up every year. Asian industrialization swamps all other effects.
Since a lack of willingness to sacrifice and the difficulty in proving what CO2 build-up will do to temperatures I think we need to approach the problem differently. Admit there is a risk of warming and resulting risks of flooding, crop failures, and other problems. But also admit that humans aren't going to inflict major sacrifices on themselves to do much about it. The big surge in Prius sales is coming mostly from high oil prices, not due to concern about the Greenland ice mass. Though you can expect many Prius buyers to try to claim higher status due to their supposed environmental consciousness.
So what to do? Accelerate the development of technologies for getting energy from non-fossil fuels sources. Also, develop technologies for climate engineering.
Some argue that aging is a dignified and life-enriching process. But the accumulation of damage to the body exacts a terrible price in human suffering.
A novel study that attempts to paint the most accurate and detailed description yet of how Americans experience pain has found that a significant portion of the population -- 28 percent -- are in pain at any given moment and those with less education and lower income spend more of their time in pain. Those in pain are less likely to work or socialize with others and are more inclined to watch television than the pain-free.
The study, which appears in the May 3 issue of The Lancet, was prepared by Alan Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton University, and Arthur Stone, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stony Brook University. The work is the first of its type, according to the authors, to quantify a "pain gap" in American society, with the "have-nots" suffering a disproportionate amount in relation to the "haves."
This focus on a "pain gap" distracts from the more basic problem: our bodies wear out as we age and the accumulated damage causes pain. Our limited capacity to regenerate our bodies means that many of us suffer as we age.
One problem is that manual laborers suffer more wear and tear on their bodies.
Workers in blue collar jobs reported higher occurrences and more severe pain than did those in white collar jobs. For blue collar workers, pain was lower when they were off work than when they were working. The 13 percent of people who reported a work-related disability experienced very high rates of pain, and accounted for 44 percent of the total amount of time that Americans spent in moderate to severe pain.
But keep in mind that 56% of those suffering moderate to severe pain did not get it as a result of a work-related injury. Some get injuries in sports, car accidents, and in other activities. Others get damaged by rheumatoid arthritis and other auto-immune disorders. Still others just get worn out joints and connective tissue from the aging process. The result is chronic pain and suffering. Shouldn't we want to develop regenerative therapies to reverse this decay and end the suffering that so many of us are otherwise destined for?
Once you get the painful injury the suffering lasts for decades.
Alarmingly, those in pain were likely to suffer over years, even decades. "The pain doesn't go away in many cases, when people stop working," Krueger said. Pain was higher and more common for older individuals, but the amount of pain reported remained relatively constant for individuals from their mid-40s to their mid-70s.
We need stem cell therapies, tissue engineering techniques, and gene therapies that will fix damaged tissue and eliminate the causes of chronic pain.
